Wasn’t this the very pit she had seen earlier in the day?!

This made no sense.

Ye Shu wracked her brain, unable to fathom how this sinkhole could move—and now it felt as if something below was yanking at her ankles. No wonder those people below couldn’t last more than a few seconds.

So there really is something down there!

"Sister Ye, let me save you!"

Fu Shiyi had barely rushed over when Ye Shu cut him off sharply: “You, back off! I’m not so weak that I need you to rescue me. Just stay out of my way, and don’t drag me down later.”

Whatever was below… it wasn’t just a single thing.

Before she could climb out, she’d have to deal with them first.

Ye Shu summoned every last ounce of strength, but still couldn’t climb free. From her storage space, she drew her peach wood sword, freed one hand, and slashed downward—a sudden weight tugging at her ankles vanished in an instant.

It worked!

Ye Shu struck a few more times below her feet.

Looking down, she saw that the darkness of the pit seemed noticeably lighter.

Not daring linger at the edge, Ye Shu used the moment to leap clear.

She barely registered landing before Fu Shiyi enveloped her in a bear hug. A familiar cool woody scent filled her nose. “Sister Ye, you’re amazing! I really thought you weren’t going to make it!”

Fu Shiyi gazed up at her with open admiration, leaving Ye Shu momentarily speechless.

“Your big sister’s got plenty of lives yet! A mere pit like this—child’s play.”

Though she spoke with nonchalance, Ye Shu quietly edged a few steps farther away from the pit.

If she really fell in, actually dying would be the least of her worries—the real loss would be burning through a precious respawn bar.

"Sister Ye, doesn’t this look exactly like the black holes in those novels, the ones that can devour everything?"

"Enough jokes—let’s get out of here. That thing isn’t something humans can fight."

Ye Shu’s sharp eyes caught something alarming—the pit was slowly widening, devouring not just the ground but the entire roadway.

Its diameter, once nearly ten meters, had nearly doubled.

So the game’s so-called ‘Devouring Survival’ was exactly this black hole.

As for just how much it could devour… that was a problem for later.

Fu Shiyi gave a small sigh and hurried after her.

......

The hotel had been completely consumed—time to find somewhere new to stay.

Ye Shu saw a chance to slip out of F City in the chaos, but ended up stuck in a traffic jam, her car immobilized on the national highway.

Fortunately, the black hole’s advance was slow—still crawling at the center of the city.

D District chat channel.

[Pink Hairdryer Loves Muddy Puddles: What a catastrophic opening! That wandering abyss between cities—could it be a black hole? It’s devouring whole high-rise towers, reducing them to dust in a matter of minutes.]

[Weak Kidneys Take Kidney Tonic: Lucky me, the game tossed me down at the South Pole—way too far for the black hole to be a real threat, not in the short term.]

[Customer Service 10085: So this is what ‘Devouring Survival’ means? Eternal life with the heavens? Then why send us players here at all? Wouldn’t it be better just to die quietly on the spot?]

[My Criminal White Moonlight Ex-wife: There’s a livestream from F City for those interested—I think I just saw something like a tentacle reaching out from the black hole… then it vanished again. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks; I barely slept last night.]

[F4 Super-hero Boy Band: Has no one noticed the infamous mystical pit everyone talked about in this game world is suddenly missing? Maybe it really is the same pit—they said it was dormant for three whole years, right?]

[Lucky Zhu Cuihua: Isn’t this just a death package for players? So what? If I die, I die. Lucky me, I drew a revive card for this round—ha ha ha!]

Tentacles in the black hole?!

When she’d nearly fallen, she was certain—something had been dragging her down there.

If it’s a living thing, maybe it can be killed… But when she had touched the black hole, she wasn’t torn apart. That random NPC had just been dragged under, not pulverized by gravitational force.

Could it be that the black hole wasn’t fully developed at the time?

Ye Shu exited the game screen and opened the official website—sure enough, there was the livestream someone had mentioned.

From above, the black hole melded into the cityscape—almost invisible unless you searched for it.

And in less than an hour.

In F City, the evacuation turned into a flood—more people than ever tried to flee, but most were trapped in the snarl of traffic.

Some, spotting the black hole approaching the city outskirts, simply abandoned their cars and continued on foot. Ye Shu was one of them.

They walked the entire night; nobody dared slacken their pace.

Day two in the game.

Dawn arrived.

"Sister Ye, where are we going?"

Fu Shiyi was lugging a pack almost as tall as himself, sweating like a waterfall, while Ye Shu strolled beside him, cool as could be, tablet in hand monitoring the black hole’s movements in real time.

Impossible to see by night—but by day, it was clear: the black hole had grown many times in size.

At a glance, it was ten times bigger than before!

If it kept growing like this, surviving half a month wouldn’t have been hard—but the true difficulty in this round was not knowing when the ordeal would end.

Ye Shu squinted, reviewing the video feed—she noticed the environment around the black hole was subtly warped; buildings would get shredded into fragments before they even touched it, and then get sucked in.

Buildings, cityscape, ground—nothing was spared.

The places already swallowed left behind a thousand pockmarked craters.

"Damn experts! Didn’t they say the pit was safe? Now it’s on the move! Thirty years of mortgage, and my house gets swallowed by that bastard—didn’t even leave me a breadcrumb!"

"At least you’re alive—my downstairs neighbor’s family? Only the little girl survived, no idea what she’ll do. Luckily I have relatives in G City I can stay with."

The surrounding survivors grumbled and cursed, but thankfully, the evacuation went without further incident. By midday, traveling with the crowd, they reached the nearest S City.

......

A massive wave of refugees flooded into S City.

Even with every hotel and guesthouse open, housing was scarce.

Ye Shu commandeered a car, loaded it with a week’s worth of supplies, and promptly left S City behind.

So far, the pace of the black hole’s consumption wasn’t alarming—but that might change at any moment.

She wasn’t alone in her thinking—many others hurried to gather resources and escape.

The citizens of S City were nervous as well.

A moving black hole suddenly devouring buildings nearby—widening all the while. That, above all, was what made people truly afraid.

By 16:21 that afternoon.

The black hole had already consumed a third of D City’s structures.

At this rate, D City would be a memory within three days.

Meanwhile—

In D City.

Ye Wanwan was hemmed in among evacuees who hadn’t made it out in time, curled in silence on the rear seat of a military truck.

Just hours earlier, she’d left behind the man who had raised her—for the sake of her own survival.

"He was the one who insisted on saving me. He volunteered. It had nothing to do with me. This is a game world—trust no one. If you have to blame someone, blame him for being too foolish." Ye Wanwan reassured herself again and again.

It was Qin Fen, with his impaired legs, who’d stubbornly tried to carry her to safety...

She wasn’t in the wrong.

She had ceased to be the Qin family’s daughter long ago.